A crowd-sourced database of coronamusic: documenting online making and sharing of music during the COVID-19 pandemic

When a sweeping COVID-19 pandemic forced cultural venues, schools, and social hangouts into hibernation in early 2020, music life relocated to the digital world. On social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, sofas and balconies took center stage for musical performances presented as live-streamed concerts and recorded videos. Amateurs and professional musicians alike embraced digital formats and innovated novel genres of corona-themed music. We will refer to the products of this musical phenomenon collectively as "coronamusic." Adapting a well-known term from cultural musicology (Small, 1999), the diverse practices of listening, playing, dancing, composing, rehearsing, improvising, discussing, exploring, and innovating within this domain will be characterized as "corona-musicking." This study aims to establish the CORONAMUSIC DATABASE–a crowdsourced corpus of links to coronamusic videos and news media reports (https://osf.io/y7z28/). This constitutes the first readily accessible and searchable resource for researchers from all disciplines with an interest in documenting and investigating the musical dynamics underlying the pandemic.

‘Music and Personality’ A Study of Cultural Musicology Based on the Art of Music in the Socio-Psychological Deck

Music is unique among Arts. From the genesis of humanity, it has a strong history. Beyond the boundaries of Arts, music has certain characteristic capabilities which enable the mankind to develop and modify its intrinsic quality. In the beginning it grew along with emotions of mankind. With the growth of science and mental maturity, it has been restricted into the frame of ‘Art’. Music cherished itself accordingly to the accepting capacity and laws of the society, for ages and operated the doctrine is a fact in the history. This article concentrates through an inter-disciplinary approach on the influence of music in the personality development of human beings as the universal research fields are multi-facet.

Noisy Modernization? On the History and Historicization of Sound

Sound ‘does’ things to places, to people and to time: it can affect change. This collection focuses specifically on the role sound has played as an agent of modernity. How were sound and music used as the material of modernization, how did they help create group identities, how were they mobilized in asserting power? In order to study this active quality of sound and music in the formation of the modern world, the contributors to this collection propose an interdisciplinary approach, including methods from sound studies and cultural musicology, and data from archives as well as record collections and catalogues.

Music Store as a Socio-Cultural Phenomenon

The subject of this article is the role and place of music store as a phenomenon in cultu­ral history. It is located “at the intersection” of historical and socio-cultural musicology but it has not been previously studied from this perspective. The relevance of the topic is related to the fact that the study of the music store phenomenon in all versati­lity gives an opportunity to have a new look at different aspects of musical and social life: history of performing art, concert practice, music management, development of music instruments, book and music publishing. It covers the emergence of music stores (based on bookstalls with an expanded pro­duct range, publishing houses, factories for production of musical instruments); their locations as well as different aspects of functioning (including in the system of music management, edu­cation and enlightenment). On the example of the most famous stores of Moscow and Petersburg of the end of the 18th — beginning of the 20th century, it is shown that music stores played a strongly pronounced culture spreading role in the history of Russian culture. In particular, reading rooms and libraries were organized at music stores; concerts were organized with their mediation; skilled staff of the music industry grew in their depths. There is noted that the cultural function of music store was particularly evident in the provinces where it would become a noticeable cultural and intellectual centre. The article indicates main directions of further research in this and related fields of knowledge; traces the fate of this institution in our days: changing the forms of work, going from offline to online space.

Listening out and dealing with otherness. A postcolonial approach to higher education teaching

Postcolonial pedagogy invites academic teaching staff to create situations, in which hegemonic modes of knowledge production can be critically reflected and one’s own entanglement as disciplinary socialised member of (western) academia experienced. Such a postcolonial approach has been applied to a seminar in the context of cultural musicology and its impact on teaching and learning analysed. In this paper, the findings of the accompanying research are presented and discussed in relation to the concept of Bildung, theories on individual learning (in higher education) and current processes to internationalise the curricula. Throughout the argumentation, I will demonstrate how postcolonial pedagogy may cause the construction of otherness and why this simultaneously constitutes the biggest challenge as well as the profoundest reward when applying such an approach to university teaching. In addition to that, this paper introduces a definition of postcolonial pedagogy and offers recommendations to foster its implementation in higher education contexts.

Expressiveness in Music Performance

During the last decade, in the fields of both systematic musicology and cultural musicology, a lot of research effort (using methods borrowed from music informatics, psychology, and neurosciences) has been spent to connect two worlds that seemed to be very distant or even antithetic: machines and emotions. Mainly in the Sound and Music Computing framework of human-computer interaction an increasing interest grew in finding ways to allow machines communicating expressive, emotional content using a nonverbal channel. Such interest has been justified with the objective of an enhanced interaction between humans and machines exploiting communication channels that are typical of human-human communication and that can therefore be easier and less frustrating for users, and in particular for non-technically skilled users (e.g. musicians, teacher, students, common people). While on the one hand research on emotional communication found its way into more traditional fields of computer science such as Artificial Intelligence, on the other hand novel fields are focusing on such issues. The examples are studies on Affective Computing in the United States, KANSEI Information Processing in Japan, and Expressive Information Processing in Europe. This chapter presents the state of the art in the research field of a computational approach to the study of music performance. In addition, analysis methods and synthesis models of expressive content in music performance, carried out by the authors, are presented. Finally, an encoding system aiming to encode the music performance expressiveness will be detailed, using an XML-based approach.